By 1961 the Soviet Union had built up a considerable lead in the space race. It had launched the first artificial satellite in 1957 and the first manned space flight in April 1961. By 25 May 1961 the only American manned space flight had been a fifteen minute sub-orbital flight. Even so, on that day…

What I really wanted was a kit of the Antonov An-24 which is the Russian equivalent of the Fokker F27 Friendship. I thought it would be interesting to stand them next to each other to show how different designers came to a similar conclusion when faced by similar aeronautical problems. But since there is not…

Like several other notable aeroplane designs of its time, such as the Bristol Blenheim and Dornier Do17, this Amiot medium bomber first saw the light of day in the guise of a high speed postal aeroplane. However, when the Amiot 341 was displayed at the Paris Salon in 1936 it already had a bomb bay.…

After World War II and into the 1950s the French Army used large numbers of British Daimler Ferret armoured cars in North Africa. It decided to acquire similar vehicles with a wider range of armament and, after testing prototypes, selected the design from Panhard. Production of the Automitrailleuse Légère (AML) commenced in 1960 and since…

DeHavilland Canada designed and manufactured a series of successful general aviation and commuter aircraft, beginning with the late 1940s Chipmunk trainer and including the Beaver, Otter and Twin Otter. In the 1960s it produced the Dash-7, a relatively large fifty passenger four turboprop engined airliner and, in the 1970s, the company’s market research suggested there…

History will probably look back as favourably on the Douglas DC-9 and its subsequent incarnations as being as successful as the older DC-3. In fact it has turned out to be a much more versatile aeroplane than the DC-3 with increases in range and carrying capacity that were way beyond the developments that could be…

At the beginning of the Cold War the United States’ and the Soviet Union’s main long range bomber was the Boeing B-29 and its Russian copy, the Tu-4. However, the development of the atomic bomb and the jet engine revolutionized the potential performance and striking power of strategic bombers and the Soviet Union began development…

By the beginning of the 1980s it was clear to United States defense planners that existing and envisaged air defense systems could detect and shoot down just about any aeroplane, making it impossible to effectively attack well defended targets. The solution to this problem appeared to be ‘stealth’ technology that made attacking aeroplanes invisible (or…

The P5M was a direct descendent of the Martin PBM Mariner that served with many air forces around the world during World War II. Towards the end of the war the US Navy began considering development of a more modern flying boat and the Martin company’s proposal for an improved PBM gained favour. The new…

The deHavilland Drover was an attempt to produce an aircraft to replace the venerable deHavilland DH-84 Dragon that has flown successfully around Australia from the mid 1930s. It was similar to the deHavilland twin engined Dove but with three engines, designed for use in regional and remote areas so it was rugged and simple to…

The B-36 ‘Peacemaker’ has one serious claim to fame; it was seriously big. This huge bomber, the largest ever made, became one of the United States most potent symbols of world wide military power because it could go anywhere and drop an astonishing weight of bombs including, or course, atomic and hydrogen bombs. It’s development…

Jack Northrop was a gifted aeronautical engineer with an obsession for producing the most aerodynamically efficient aeroplane possible. He reasoned that he could achieve that goal by taking away from the ideal aeroplane everything that was not necessary for it to fly, and that basically left him with nothing but a wing. In 1929 he…